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Jan. 22, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:07:04
Inauguration Special: Aaron Maté, Michael Tracey & Jenin Younes on Next Trump Admin Hopes & Fears

Michael Tracey, Jenin Younes, and Aaron Maté discuss the best and worst scenarios for the Trump administration, Trump's ceasefire deal, and more. ------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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All right, we are back.
We are joined by two esteemed guests.
Janine Yunus, Aaron Mate, who you all know and love.
Man of the hour, living legend.
And Megan is also back.
And so, we are here in the sleet at the Spotify Pop-Up Studio.
Got lots of music blasting around, but now we're going to delve into the real issues of the day.
And Aaron, you and I were at this event last night.
They called it a Peace Ball.
What were some of your observations from that event?
Like, Megan and I were talking just before you got here.
It seems like a pale imitation of, like, some resistance fervor trying to be replicated now, and, like, no one really cares anymore.
You had all these kind of cringeworthy, kind of left-wing flatitudes and things.
I mean, I don't necessarily begrudge people for holding it or wanting to attend something that maybe wasn't overtly pro-Trump like every other event that's being held in Washington, D.C. What were some of your observations?
Then we do have some clips that I want to share with both of you and get your reaction to, but just your broad takes on the state of the resistance.
Also, by the way, in the New York Times, we talked about earlier today, they were reporting that the woman who actually Knitted the prototype for the original putsy hat in 2017 for the Women's March.
Even she is so dispirited that she's not even bothering to protest this time around.
So, I guess, what does it tell you about the resistance or lack thereof?
Taking this back to 2017 and the first day of Trump's administration, the resistance.
Embodied by the Women's March and the parallel rallies at the airports against the Muslim ban.
What explains how all that has dissipated?
Well, I mean, again, I'm very influenced and biased by the issues I've focused on.
So one of them, of course, is Russiagate.
Really?
I hadn't heard of that.
Which I think killed everything.
How could it not?
When you channel resistance to Trump and all the legitimate ways to oppose him.
Into a dumb conspiracy theory.
And your savior figures become people like MSNBC pundits screaming about Russia every night.
And Robert Mueller.
John Brennan.
John Brennan.
And enrolling people further in a neocon orthodoxy.
And just reducing resistance to watching cable news and hoping that Robert Mueller is going to issue the long-awaited indictments for a Russia conspiracy.
So I think that killed it right there.
And then now you have, I mean, fast forwarding to today, although in that time that sort of cemented this like faith in institutions, that was like the mantra constantly, the institutions were going to hold Trump to account.
And by that they meant the courts, they meant special prosecutors after Robert Mueller, it was Jack Smith, hoping for all these various legal cases against Trump, the classified documents that now nobody cares about, the hush money case in New York.
They resurrected the Espionage Act.
Yeah.
So you charged Trump, and now nobody cares.
Yeah.
And the various scams, the lie about Hunter Biden's laptop being from Russia, the Russian bounties in Afghanistan.
So a combination of outright scams and conspiracy theories, most of them tied to Russia fantasies, and then this devout belief in lawfare, and of course it's going to show for nothing.
And so now Trump is coming back in, so no wonder people are...
Feeling deflated.
And then you have the Gaza genocide, as I call it.
I know not everyone describes it that way.
And that certainly split the Democratic base.
A lot of people who supported the Democrats and were able to oversee some of their other missteps, including on Russiagate, were very let down by Biden's policy and the failures of the Democrats to hold him to account and the failure of Kamala Harris to chart a different course.
So those are the main factors.
That I see right now, among many, in the deflation of the resistance.
And last night at this Peace Ball, I saw a lot of very commendable statements, people outraged by Gaza and feeling betrayed by that.
But even there, even in that movement, you have areas where I just have my disagreements that I think...
Made a real movement impossible.
For example, you had these progressive lawmakers last night who have taken a lot of heat for their brave stances on Gaza.
Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush.
Jim McGovern was there as well.
But what did they do when it comes to voting for the Ukraine proxy war?
Enriching the very military industrial complex that last night they were talking about fighting.
They all voted yes every single time in lockstep.
And I blame Russiagate in part for that.
Let me just stop you there because I have to play this clip.
Excuse me, Janine, for passing you over on that question.
We'll get to you, I promise, on that same issue.
We want everyone to react to this clip.
This is one of the most unbelievable interviews I think I've ever conducted.
So Cori Bush is out of Congress now as of January 3rd.
She lost her Democratic primary in Missouri.
To Wesley Bell, who was funded by AIPAC and pro-Israel lobbying groups, and she was pilloried for calling for a ceasefire very early.
AIPAC spent over $8 million just to defeat her.
Her and Jamal Bowman were the two main Democratic incumbents who were ousted.
And what was most cynical about those primary campaigns is that the pro-Israel funders would air ads in the districts of the congresspeople that often had nothing at all to do with Israel.
They would claim she wasn't loyal enough to supporting President Biden's infrastructure plan and stuff, when obviously they didn't give a shit about infrastructure.
But anyway, you've got to hear this, because I asked her about this very issue that you raised about the handful of Democrats in Congress who have been critical of the Israel policy having this incredible blind spot for Ukraine policy.
I've never heard...
And being progressives were supposed to stand for funding social programs and not funding wars.
That's the bedrock of being a progressive.
But yet we couldn't find one to vote once against the Ukraine proxy.
Literally not one.
Democrats were 100% united in voting for those appropriations packages around Ukraine.
Let's listen to this, and we're going to splice it in in editing so people can hear it, but I'm just going to play it on my computer for now.
You mentioned in your speech earlier at this event that we're at the Peace Ball, basically advocating for a general movement of peace.
I'm wondering how you relate that to the issue of Ukraine, because it seems like the Democrats in Congress were virtually united, actually 100% united in funding Ukraine, which...
Whether you like it or not, that does involve sending a giant amount of munitions and weapons and armaments into a hugely destructive war where you have hundreds of thousands of casualties, Russians and Ukrainians piling up in the battlefield.
And the only criticism was coming from a section of Republicans.
Is there any contradiction, do you think, in terms of you calling for peace or Democrats calling for peace and not being willing to at all re-evaluate?
The policy on Ukraine, which has really been extremely catastrophic.
It's some of the most brutal warfare since World War I, like 100 years ago.
And Democrats, from my perspective, just to be honest with you, have been very missing in action in kind of critically evaluating that policy and just going along with it, whatever the Biden-Harris administration wanted in terms of weapons.
Really, what about diplomacy?
What about some other option, rather than just dumping endless weapons into Ukraine?
Is that fair, do you think?
I think the other part of that, though, is the threat of U.S. troops by the masses moving to the ground was a very real thing.
At least that's how it was presented.
It had been presented to us in Congress, and for me...
Presented by who?
Presented by the administration, that that would be a very real thing.
Did we want to keep U.S. troops from having to go to Ukraine?
You know, so that was the thing that people were weighing.
So the White House presented, just to clarify, the Biden White House presented the issue to you as if you don't supply the weapons that they say are required, that could involve, that might mean that U.S. troops would have to go into the combat?
If we don't, not saying that if we don't supply the weapons, it was if you all don't support.
If you all don't support these bills, then that could be the outcome.
And so for many, and I can't speak for everyone, but the question, when I look at my own district, when I look at my own district and I think about those who often are the ones who end up...
With the least amount of help, the least amount of services, often don't have what they need when they return back.
I wanted to support my community in that.
So that's what that was about, making sure that we weren't sending the same...
Black and brown bodies to go and do this bidding and then using the money and the resources to go and do that.
I can't speak for everyone, but I know that that was what some people were thinking.
Like I said, I can't speak for everyone.
I didn't have those conversations, but that was just a very real thing.
Sorry, I forgot to put my microphone in my face.
Your thinking at the time...
You know, when these appropriations bills came forward in terms of arms for Ukraine, was that by approving arms for Ukraine, you were lessening the likelihood that, as you put it, black and brown soldiers or people that had joined the military would end up getting deployed to Ukraine.
So that's how the administration framed it.
So I assume, you know, through no fall of your own, you're not somebody who spent a whole lot of time probably focused on the issue of Ukraine.
Over the course of your career, you have other interests, mostly, right?
And so they presented it to you.
Or your interpretation was that by providing those munitions, you were basically saving or...
No.
No.
Okay.
No, no, no, no.
It wasn't providing munitions.
It was supporting these bills, supporting these bills to hold off Russia, supporting these bills.
Was there funding for...
For munitions.
For what the funding was for, this was a way to stop us from sending U.S. troops who, for me, what I was already dealing with in my district were mostly black and brown and marginalized folks that we were trying to help.
It was to stop that from being the next occurrence.
That's what that was for.
But those bills provided munitions.
I've given you a lot of time, a lot of time, and so, you know, and for you to turn this into a Ukraine thing was not, you know, so I, you know, I'm trying to answer your question.
I'm trying to be respectful, honestly.
I just thought that Ukraine was relevant, given that we're at the Peace Ball, that's another conflict going on.
You don't think so?
No, no, no, no, absolutely.
I just, what I'm saying is, is that I, you keep, like...
Going, asking question after question after question.
I only answered two questions with everybody else.
I gave you, like, what, six?
No, that's fine, yeah.
So, you know.
All right.
Well, I appreciate it either way.
I didn't mean to be rude at all.
No, you weren't being rude.
You took the opportunity to just...
I did.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anyone would do.
I get it.
I'm just saying, I just...
Okay, yeah.
All right, well...
And again, I don't want to speak for other people about, because I haven't had those conversations.
So, yeah.
All right, well, former Congressman Cori Bush of Missouri, thank you very much.
Absolutely.
All right, thank you.
Thank you.
All right.
So, Erin, that might be my favorite of you I've ever done.
Her argument, I never heard this before, have you?
Me either.
That voting for Ukraine funding was presented to her, or at least she interpreted the case that was being made by the Biden administration as by voting for these appropriations bills.
Which she seemed not even to be totally clear included funding for munitions.
Because remember, people like Cori Bush are never even asked about Ukraine.
Exactly.
They're asked about Israel a fair amount because they have a position that is going against the grain somewhat.
But on Ukraine, it's just exempt from any scrutiny.
Whereas Republicans are asked about it all the time to probe the fissures within the Republican coalition.
But she's saying that she voted for those Ukraine funding bills to protect black and brown bodies in St. Louis.
First of all, I want to say I have a lot of admiration for Cori Bush.
I do.
She's a first-term Congress member.
She gets targeted by AIPAC. She's already under a lot of pressure, you know, coming from a working-class background, being a black woman, being a progressive.
There's all these forces aligned against her.
So her position on Ukraine, I don't even fault her for it, but I do blame the progressive leadership in Congress who...
Basically, force someone like her into a position where if they were to take a different stance to vote against all this money for Ukraine proxy war, they'd be even more vulnerable and targeted.
And I understand why someone in their position would have a hard time doing that.
But the answers she's giving to you just make no sense.
First of all, if it's true what she's saying, that the administration said that, you know, if we don't get this money for the Ukraine proxy war, then we might see a situation where our own forces have to fight.
Then basically, that shows the Biden administration, if it's true the Biden administration said that, then the Biden administration would have committed a pretty big lie because the Biden administration always said, we're not going to send troops to Ukraine no matter what.
So if they were using that as sort of like blackmail behind the scenes, and it's a big if, by the way.
I don't want to take what she said there as like, on faith, as like that was like a threat issued by Biden.
But it's quite possible that they did.
Regardless, if that's what they did, it's incredibly cynical because they weren't going to send troops to fight in Ukraine.
That was never an option.
The whole point of the Ukraine proxy war, the whole reason to prolong it was to use Ukraine to bleed Russia.
That's what Jake Sullivan acknowledged.
That's what Lloyd Austin acknowledged.
Everybody knows now that that was the aim.
So this threat that we might have to send troops one day.
And then if the Biden administration did threaten, then Cori Bush buys that.
It's just ridiculous because what you should do in that situation is call their bluff.
And say, I'm sorry, you're not going to blackmail American taxpayers by threatening to send our own troops into this disastrous war that nobody wants and that could have been avoided.
But Aaron, I think it's probably fair to say that she just does not have a foundation of knowledge from which she could have drawn to call the bluff.
So she's just taking the cues from the people who are briefing her.
It's not like when she was an activist in Ferguson or whatever, she was spending a lot of time thinking about Ukraine.
100%.
And that's where I felt people like Pramila Jayapal and Bernie Sanders, every other progressive leader in Congress who's been there for a lot longer than Cori Bush, who knew exactly what was up, who knew there wasn't a threat of the U.S. going off to war.
But still then basically told everyone to go along with funding it, spending well over $100 billion to prolong a proxy war that could have been avoided before Russia invaded and certainly afterwards when there were peace talks.
And amazingly, this is forgotten, but there was a 24-hour period where people like Cori Bush, after voting for all these multibillion-dollar bills, signed on to a letter calling for diplomacy.
But after a little freakout online from...
This is the Progressive Caucus letter.
They withdrew it.
And they apologized for daring to call for diplomacy and using the overwhelming U.S. leverage.
And then Cori Bush says, so to protect black and brown bodies and to be able to...
Care for them.
That to me is the most cynical part.
I don't know if she's being consciously cynical, but to invoke this nomenclature of black and brown bodies to try to provide some bizarre extraneous justification for supporting more funding, that's almost a parody of left-wing lingo being deployed in whatever circumstance is seen as necessary at the moment.
Especially when all that money...
That was spent on this horrible war could have actually served marginalized communities.
That's the whole point.
That's what I thought being a progressive is about, is not supporting foreign conflicts, at least those that are unnecessary like this one and destructive, and instead spending on social welfare at home.
And had progressives taken up that mantle, they could have provided an alternative to the Republicans who opposed.
The Ukraine proxy war money and I think benefited from that electorally because there was a significant percentage of the population that also didn't want to see all this money spent fueling conflict abroad.
So it's sad for me to hear someone like Corey Boyce, who I think is a genuine advocate of peace, of social justice, you know, all these noble things, being intimidated into going along with it and then coming up with the type of really, you know, questionable rationale that we just heard.
Janine, do you have a thought on that?
Because Cori Bush really was very much out front calling for a ceasefire early on.
I think it was either maybe even October of 2023 in Israel.
There's a lot of activist pressure applied to her and other Democrats around the Israel issue.
And yet there's another major conflict that's been roiling the world and the US political system for even longer than the post October 7th conflict.
And then at least, and she just doesn't have a cogent thing to say about it at all, despite having voted for every appropriations bill funding US provisions in Ukraine.
So what do you make of that dynamic?
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only journalist who ever asked these people about this issue.
Really?
On both sides.
I mean, I think she's kind of emblematic of a lot of Democrats who, you know, have what I would call the right position on Israel-Gaza, because in a way that's more obvious.
You know, you're talking about people who've been under occupation and siege in Gaza for many years, decades, and are, you know, now being bombed, genocide committed against them.
So it's kind of easier to be on the right side of that one.
But I think a lot of progressives don't quite understand.
What the correct stance is.
Not that there's only one correct stance, but the real issues.
And I use my mother as an example all the time because she's very smart, but she sort of reads the New York Times and takes everything they say at face value.
She doesn't look behind that.
And she thinks we should definitely be in Ukraine.
And that's sort of the agenda that's being pushed by the progressive left and the left-wing media at this point.
And I think a lot of people don't really look behind that, as obviously Cori Bush did.
And this is where I fault, by the way, progressive media, where people like Cori Bush, Give us some examples, like Democracy Now?
Like my former home, Democracy Now, which again, they represent a type of progressive media outlet that after the Russian invasion forgot all the reporting they did for years, and I was a part of when I used to work there, on the role of NATO and Ukraine and the coup of 2014 and the Minsk Accords.
All this context that is so important to understanding that, like, Russia's invasion, whatever you think of it, and you don't have to justify it to just recognize all the factors in which there was a provocation and this could have been resolved peacefully.
And certainly the answer was not necessarily to flood Ukraine with billions of dollars worth of weapons and obstruct the peace talks that began between Ukraine and Russia immediately.
and shows like Democracy now sadly forgot all this and bought into the proxy, a lot of the proxy war.
And then when progressives like Cori Bush would come on, would never challenge them on, hey, why are you voting to authorize tens of billions of dollars in war fight? - Well, I think part of what happened was Russia also became the bad guy during the Trump administration and a lot of progressives sort of bought into that Trump and Russia were one, and so I think that sort of fit into the narrative and convinced a lot of progressives that being in Ukraine was the right thing.
You can criminalize diplomacy with Russia.
Ukraine did.
Sorry, Russiagate criminalized diplomacy.
Oh, and Ukraine literally passed a presidential order.
Yes, to rule it out.
It enacted an order prohibiting any diplomacy with Putin.
But the ideological and narrative foundations for that was Russiagate, where all of a sudden...
In the liberal mind, in many progressive minds too, Trump and Russia became synonymous.
Everything bad about Trump was then the fault of Russia, and therefore dealing with Russia was therefore treason, and that helped set the stage for the Ukraine war.
Yeah, and they also created this kind of superstructural narrative about how Russia was responsible for any emergence of dangerous right-wing populism anywhere in the world.
world.
Hillary Clinton famously gave a speech in August of 2016 where she kind of introduced this theory.
And the exact quote, to the best of my recollection, was she called Putin the grand godfather of global extremism.
I think she might have misspoken, but she ended up saying grand godfather of global right-wing extremism.
And that carried forth ever since where Putin was responsible for Le Pen in France and whoever.
And there might be some kind of conversions of interest here and there, but it was always really overstated in terms of the direct, proximate, causal relationship that he would have with any of these incredibly disparate movements anywhere in the world.
I remember Putin was blamed for the trucker trucker protests against Canada. - Yes. - So it goes on and on and on.
But as far as the incoming Trump administration though, I wanted to play just a brief clip, and Ginny, I promise we will get to the Israel thing soon.
But I wanted to play a brief clip Here's Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary nominee.
Yes.
I don't know if you saw this.
He had his confirmation hearing this past week, and he's being questioned by Senator Mark Warner, and the issue of Ukraine comes up.
So I just want to have this be like a window into what policy continuity or divergence might be on the offing as the Trump administration comes in.
I believe that the sanctions regime, especially, well, first of all, I would say in my adult life that the tragedy going on in Ukraine is one of the greatest tragedies of my adult life.
And ending that as soon as possible, an inner role the Treasury can...
As we discussed, I believe that the sanctions were not fulsome enough.
I believe that the previous administration was worried about raising U.S. energy prices during an election season.
And I am perplexed to see that National Security Advisor Sullivan, on his way out the door, is raising the sanctions level on Russian oil companies.
And indeed, the oil prices in the U.S. are up about 9% this month.
So what was good for that administration is being foisted on us.
But having gone from, I think, Low-level sanctions to mid-level that if any officials in the Russian Federation are watching this confirmation hearing, they should know that if I'm confirmed and if President Trump requests,
and as part of his strategy to end the Ukraine war, that I will be 100% on board for taking sanctions up, especially on the Russian oil majors, to levels that would bring The Russian Federation to the table.
And I want to take 30 seconds.
Let me just get 30 seconds.
Thank you for that, because I think it's important that we don't take these tools out of the toolkit.
We can litigate what the past administration did and when they did it.
But increasing pressure on Putin to bring about a resolution, I very much appreciate your willingness, and I hope you will be an advocate for keeping those sanctions on and actually advancing them even further.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Senator Warner.
Okay, so Aaron, that's the incoming Treasury Secretary criticizing the Biden administration for not applying severe enough sanctions to Russia and saying that the incoming Trump administration, they'll be less reluctant to actually hit them where it hurts by ramping up sanctions on the Russian state oil companies.
And actually, this has been something that's been proposed in Trump circles or Trump adjacent circles for a while now as to how his policy approach would differ.
And something that really bugged me over the course of this 2024 campaign was that when Trump would talk about the issue of Ukraine-Russia, he would usually say something like the war never would have happened had he been in power.
He'll solve the war as president-elect, which we have now less than 24 hours, I guess, for him to do that.
So we'll have to wait and see what happens by noon.
But there was very little specifics sussed out And this is the incoming Treasury Secretary, and this has been echoed by others, saying that they want to actually increase the bellicosity with Russia, and somehow that's going to give the U.S. enough leverage to force Putin to capitulate or to submit to U.S. demands.
So, I don't know, do you feel like this stuff wasn't fully fleshed out enough during the campaign, or what is your reaction?
Well, that narrative contradiction that you identified where people, everyone assumed Trump was going to be...
Calm dating with Russia, soft on Russia, however you want to put it, and then there was zero policy evidence for it.
In fact, all the evidence went in the other direction because in Trump's first term, he did impose massive sanctions on Russia.
He did tear up a really important nuclear arms treaty, which no one talks about, but puts the planet at peril, the INF Treaty, which Trump destroyed, but everybody ignored it because it undermined the prevailing narrative that he secretly was doing Russia's bidding.
And by the way, with the tearing up of the INF Treaty, Russia developed the new intermediate-range ballistic missiles that it just showcased for the first time two months ago.
Or so when it launched that really extravagant attack as kind of a demonstrative attack on a Ukraine, I think, arms production facility.
Yes, and restoring that treaty was at the center of the proposal Russia put out in late 2021 as part of its offer to avoid invading its take-it-or-leave-it offer.
One of its key goals was to restore the provisions of the INF Treaty.
So Trump played a major role.
In fueling the conflict that then led to Russia's invasion.
But he has said still recently some things that I do think are a departure from everybody else.
He's talked about how...
There does have to be a peace deal that recognizes Russian concerns.
He talked about he's empathetic with Russia's hostility towards NATO encroachment on its borders.
And he said that if he were president, he wouldn't have authorized what Biden recently did, which was letting Ukraine use long-range missiles to strike into Russia.
So Trump has said a few things recently that if he follows through on them would be a stark departure.
But as you point out, people around him...
Don't have that position, including this Treasury Secretary.
And his record in office was to be a hawk.
Now, the one thing, though, another argument for thinking why maybe he will go in a different direction now towards peace is that the tech oligarchs around him, they do want friendly relations with Russia.
Elon Musk, others, they've been critics of this proxy war for a while.
And just, you know, whereas in the first term, Trump wanted to get in with, like...
The neocons of DC, that's why he appointed all of them like John Bolton.
Now he's got people like Elon Musk in his ear.
And he does to me be like, but he's got Mike Waltz and Marco Rubio.
If you compare the relative power there, who has more power, Elon Musk or Mike Waltz?
Let me say something on this because I, and this gets into the Gaza dispute.
Oh yeah, let's make the transition.
I do think Trump 2.0 is going to be very different from Trump 1.0.
And I say this as someone who cried when Hillary Clinton lost the election.
I've had a bit of a bullshit.
Okay, well I never humiliated myself.
I actually, well I was, you know.
From there to sitting next to Mike Tracy.
I was a libertarian.
I... First, he's said a lot of things, and he said a lot of things during his campaign that troubled me, and he appointed a lot of people, especially when it comes to Israel-Palestine, who troubled me.
But he has immediately gotten out and brokered a ceasefire deal that Biden didn't bother to in 15 months.
And I think he may be playing 4D chess to an extent.
I mean, I don't know.
Maybe he's not that smart, but maybe he is.
And he's a businessman.
I don't think he likes war.
I've recently watched some clips of him from the Iraq War era where he expressed real distress about the veterans coming home, amputated, about the Iraqi people.
Now he's not beholden to any of the interests that he initially was, you know, in order to get reelected.
So I think we're going to see something very different.
And I think he may be trying to please some of his donors by putting in place some of these people who are hawks.
But I think we're going to see something really different.
I mean, he might disappoint me.
Maybe we'll be sitting here in two months and I'll eat my words.
But the fact that the first thing he did before he even took office was broker this ceasefire deal, which is very good for the Palestinians who are dancing with joy in the streets.
I bought my dad a MAGA. That is a joke, because he's so happy with Trump.
Even in the Marco Rubio confirmation hearings, he said, we want to end the dying in Ukraine, kind of echoing Trump's words, apparently.
He said that Ukraine would have to make concessions.
So I think even Marco Rubio, maybe there could be a change there.
Maybe he could be less hawkish, but we'll see.
I mean, ultimately, they're all beholden to the president, right?
So they can't, you know, Trump has to okay whatever they do.
I guess, you know, my point about Rubio is that if you compare the incoming second Trump administration to the first Trump administration, the Secretary of State is much more ideologically neocon, if you want to use that term, in the second administration than in the first.
Rex Tillerson was kind of like an apolitical...
That's true.
Yeah, that's true.
ExxonMobil CEO... Who wanted to talk to Russia.
Yeah, exactly.
Whereas Marco Rubio...
I kind of have advocated for jettisoning the term neocons.
I think it obscures more than it reveals at this point.
It's just like anybody with foreign policy views who I don't like is like, therefore, a neocon.
So whatever terminology we might use, Marco Rubio has a much more robust record of favoring really hardcore interventionist policy measures than the first incoming Secretary of State did.
Now Pompeo is much more in accord with Rubio than he was with Tillerson, but that's why there seems to be more continuity.
And Trump made a lot of these kind of gestures toward disliking war and he created Part of the reason why I think he won in 2016 was because he was calling out the trillions of dollars that had been spent in the Middle East, and then a lot of those expenditures were never really reinvested in the United States.
As he advocated, he actually escalated in Afghanistan, which people don't know or maybe never remember or never knew in the first place.
He had a record number of bombs dropped in Afghanistan in the year 2018 and 2019, and we're told that Trump is like...
Somehow opposed to the military-industrial complex is that the military-industrial complex was really unhappy with having to produce the munitions to drop at record rates in Afghanistan.
So I grant there are some rhetorical gestures that he makes.
But on the issue of Gaza, okay, I've been told that I need to repent.
And I apologize.
I'll get you a formal apology for just, like, covering the campaign when Trump was basically attached at the hip with Miriam Adelson.
Yes, it still is.
It still is.
Miriam Adelson's floating around D.C. somewhere.
She was at the Peter Thiel party last night with Don Jr. and Mark Zuckerberg.
She's hosting her own event with Zuckerberg, the Adelson Trump...
Adelson...
Zuckerberg dynamic duo is hosting their own party tomorrow, which maybe we'll be able to sneak into.
I'll wear a false mustache.
I want to go.
And Trump explicitly campaigned against the ceasefire.
He and the Republicans were basically universal in denouncing Biden for somehow being in hock to Hamas or pandering to anti-Semites, not being sufficiently pliant to Israel in provisioning weaponry.
And I'm sorry.
Israel calibrates its policy action very acutely to political dynamics in the United States.
Especially Netanyahu, who's basically an American.
He lived in Pennsylvania.
He knows all the players involved.
So, for the entirety of 2024, Netanyahu was able to kind of triangulate against the Biden administration.
Now, the Biden administration didn't impose leverage to any substantial degree.
However, there was still a political opening that Netanyahu could exploit knowing that there was a campaign season underway.
Trump was probably favored to win for the entirety of the year.
And so, therefore, he could use the fact that one entire party was explicitly against any cessation of hostilities in Israel and actually wanted them to expand.
Jared Kushner said Israel should invade Lebanon and then the next day they do it.
So should I have not covered that?
What's the alternative here?
No, but the tweet I took issue with was you said in November that the Imams, you made fun of the Imams who voted for Trump and said, are they so happy now with a laughing Imams?
About the appointments.
About Marco Rubio and Mike Huckabee.
And I said the appointments alone don't mean anything for Palestinians on the ground.
Let's see what happens and withhold.
No, but I said that.
But the whole point was that doesn't necessarily mean anything for Palestinians on the ground.
If ultimately Trump drives the policy and not the appointee's policy, then it doesn't really matter in the end.
I mean, he may have had to satisfy his donors.
In fact, I think he had to do this to get elected.
And if that's what he had to do, and then he knew all along he was going to broker a ceasefire.
I will admit that that particular tweet was maybe a bit flippant.
I'll repudiate that individual tweet, but I don't repudiate the broad thrust of my coverage.
In terms of what did Trump actually do here, it is true.
Beyond even Israeli sources who might have a stake in puffing up Trump and making him look good, other sources, Gulf states, even I think some American sources have said that Trump's...
I think they did.
I think they did.
Did Trump, by way of his envoy Steve Witkoff, exert that Biden didn't?
I think it had to be he said he'd cut off the weapons.
Do we have any evidence for that?
No, just what else would it be?
I don't know.
There's an account in the Washington Post that basically said, it doesn't say that there was a threat to cut off weapons, that the message was delivered that if you don't reach the ceasefire now, we're not going to be with you.
That was basically the threat.
So it was a more general threat.
And there was also, and people, you know...
Especially on the left, make a lot of this.
There was the tweet that Trump – or the truth that Trump shared.
Get your noun right.
I'm sorry.
Of Jeffrey Sachs, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, criticizing Netanyahu and saying that Netanyahu is basically the source of all U.S. wars in the Middle East.
And people make a lot of that because Trump did share that, and it's a very powerful clip.
The thing though there is Jeffrey Sachs in the video also really criticizes Barack Obama for the dirty war in Syria.
And that, if I could guess, is why Trump actually shared that.
I somehow doubt Trump was trying to send that message.
I disagree with both of you.
And he just heard the part where Jeffrey Sachs was criticizing Barack Obama and blaming him.
So then Trump was like, send.
The fact is he left that up.
That does speak to Trump's unique thing.
When he was in office, he talked about there being a military industrial complex.
He does say these things that no one else will say.
Well, Biden said that too in his farewell address.
He referenced the military industrial complex.
He said President Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex.
So too do I now warn about the tech industrial complex.
Yes, and that's because Elon Musk backed Trump.
If Elon Musk had backed him, he wouldn't have warned about that.
Right now, all I'm saying is that there have been a lot of prominent political figures in both parties who at least make reference nominally to the military industrial complex.
But let's just, okay, so here's Netanyahu for the first time publicly addressing this ceasefire deal yesterday.
Since he was elected, he was completely, Trump was completely committed to the release of the hostages.
We spoke on Wednesday, he congratulated me on the agreement, and he emphasized, and rightly so, that the first stage is a temporary ceasefire.
This is what he said, a temporary ceasefire.
Towards the next stages of the agreement, we We are holding on to some significant assets so that we can bring back all of the hostages and in order to accomplish all the goals of the war.
Both President Trump and President Biden have provided full backing to Israel's right to resume fighting, to resume combat if Israel reaches the conclusion that the negotiations over the second stage are pointless.
I truly appreciate that.
I also appreciate the decision of President Trump to...
Lift all the remaining restrictions on the providing of essential munitions and weapons to the state of Israel.
If we need to resume combat, we will do so in new ways, and we will do so with tremendous force.
He's trying to save face to his people, I think, because they're in shock, and he has to do something with his right-wing members of his coalition.
So you think he's just making up the entire interaction with Trump?
I think it's possible Trump may have said something, but he...
Trump doesn't mean that either.
I don't know.
I'll come back.
That's a lot of mind reading.
Those are two very real possibilities.
Either he's embellishing because he has to save face to his extremist coalition, he has to look tough, and then Trump never said that, which is quite possible for Netanyahu because he's a serial liar.
So I wouldn't put it past him just to make that up.
Or, but at the same time, Trump is obviously very deferential to Israel and to Miriam Adelson, so it also wouldn't surprise me if Netanyahu's account is correct.
We don't know.
I don't think Trump is deferential.
I didn't hear that.
You are wearing red.
You aren't fully wearing the hat yet, but I feel like the red top, it's like a nod towards your...
Well, and I'm a TikTok fan.
Aaron, I want to present this gift to you.
This would be the official Trump yarmulke.
This is actually...
I'm not giving it to you.
This is one of my most prized possessions.
I wear this.
It covers up the hair thinning, actually, nicely.
So, as penance.
For all my horrible judgment that I need to apologize for for covering Trump's rhetoric and policies, I will wear the Trump yarmulke for the remainder of the show.
And who gave this to you, by the way?
The Republican Jewish Coalition.
Really?
Yeah, I got it at the Republican Jewish Coalition.
And was this when you went on a college campus wearing a different yarmulke to see if you would be...
No, that was months before.
Separate yarmulke.
I have a whole catalog of them.
Okay, got it.
So, you know, it could be that Daniel who is embellishing.
But, at the same time, Trump, I guess we're not supposed to ignore this, but Trump spent the entire campaign in 2024 saying that Biden had betrayed Israel and he was becoming like a Palestinian because he was imposing too many...
Constraints on Israel's ability to wage war in Gaza.
I don't know what constraints or restrictions they're even referring to.
Because even the 2,000 pound bomb one was eventually lifted.
But maybe there's something.
I don't know.
Maybe it's to do with Iran or whatever.
And Netanyahu's point is being echoed over and over again by Mike Waltz.
Again, I never understand how seriously we're supposed to take the words of the people who are announcing that they're speaking on behalf of...
Not at all.
So Mike Waltz is not speaking on behalf of Trump?
No, I don't take the words of politicians seriously at all.
I assume their words have nothing to do with what they actually believe.
They have no reflection on reality.
They're just saying things to get elected and to get money.
And you have to look carefully at their actions, what they've done in the past, and that kind of thing.
And I don't think you can ever be certain.
But Mike Waltz is not trying to get elected right now.
He was appointed National Security Advisor.
No, Mike Waltz might believe it, but I don't think that necessarily has any influence on Trump's policy.
So you think he's speaking in a way that is detached from what Trump's approach is?
I do think that Mike Waltz and Ruby are both very malleable, and they know their role, and whatever Trump says, I do think they will enact.
But that could go either way.
So, for example, Mike Waltz was a strong advocate of...
Letting Ukraine use long-range U.S. missiles to fire into Russia.
If Trump follows through on his criticism of that and stops that, I do think Mike Waltz will go along with that.
But at the same time, Mike, listen, I think you're exactly on point.
All these people are openly saying that we're not backing Israel enough, and I think it's very reasonable to expect that that will reflect their policy once they come into office, especially given who their donors are.
And what their record is.
I mean, Trump moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.
He recognized Israel's theft of the Golan Heights.
And he said he bragged about how he was doing this on behalf of the Adelson.
So I won't be surprised at all if all your criticisms turn out to reflect exactly what the policy is.
But at the same time, I also don't want to rule out.
The possibility that you're raising that actually we are going to see something different because perhaps Trump, for transactional reasons, sees some benefit in stopping all this carnage and doing something differently than Biden.
And he did go to Michigan.
He did tell Arabs and Muslims there that he wanted peace.
Maybe he'll see that to his advantage electorally to follow through on that.
Well, he doesn't need any electoral advantage because he's already elected.
But, I mean, he might see it too.
I mean, I do think he wants to have a legacy.
and he knows that this would be a great legacy.
I also don't think he's a committed Zionist like Biden or Hillary Clinton or those people.
I know you don't like the word neocon, but it's that type of person, neoliberal neocon.
100%.
I don't think he really cares.
He does have a son-in-law.
I'm sure you know Tiffany's...
Husband is Lebanese and her father has a position in the administration.
This would be a great legacy.
And, you know, people are influenced by those around them.
He might very well have had some influence there.
I do think that's such an important point.
He's not a committed ideologue like Biden.
Biden actually believes in all this stuff.
He's been talking for decades about how we need it.
If Israel didn't exist, we'd have to create it ourselves.
And you see that in how he talks, how just that much he believes in this Israeli project of having a proxy that acts as the US enforcer in the region.
He believes in that.
Trump doesn't care about that.
And that doesn't make a difference.
Right, but his lack of maybe committed ideological tendencies overall in the first term contributed to him outsourcing Israel policy to those most hardened ideologues, including religious Mike Huckabee.
And, you know, is the most extreme of the extreme and aligns more with the hardcore messianic element within Israel, who, until now, always loved Trump.
I think maybe if they're repudiating Trump, it might be a bit...
Premature.
So I guess my point is the lack of an established or a defined ideological tendency, whether it's Zionism or something else, can kind of go both ways.
Sure, but a couple of points there.
First of all, I mean, he may well have promised Miriam Adelson, look, I'll make Mike Huckabee ambassador to Israel if you give me whatever amount of money in your support.
And he may have known in the back of his mind, okay, I'll do this, but that doesn't mean I have to do anything specific on the ground.
The other thing is that a lot of people didn't, you know, as I learned after October 7th, a lot of people barely knew what Gaza was.
Knew nothing about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
He might not have known very much four, five, whatever.
I can't remember when he moved to the embassy seven years ago.
But he may have learned a lot in the past year.
I've heard from people who know him.
I happen to know a lot of Republicans close to him.
I've heard that he's actually very upset.
He saw the pictures of the children, dead children, and he said he wanted to put an end to it, whereas Biden was shown those pictures by people in the State Department working for him, and he said, we're not changing our policy.
I don't want to see any more of this.
So that's why I have some hope, and I reserve the right to be wrong.
I might be wrong.
I'm not 100% confident.
But if Trump was so aghast at the gruesome images of the children being bombed, Why did he never express a hint of opposition to the bombing campaign and instead called on Biden to expedite weapons so Israel could more aggressively wage the bombing campaign, right?
I mean, I remember Trump's criticism being that Israel wasn't clamping down hard enough on the dissemination of images so it was causing a PR problem.
No, that wasn't the quote.
The quote was...
And it was taken out of context.
The quote was, these images are very bad for Israel.
They need to finish the job and get out of there.
I forgot exactly what he said, but the quote was taken to mean they should just basically nuke it.
And, you know, that was the end.
He was basically saying, get out.
Like, now.
Stop this.
This is all very bad.
He did not say that they should clamp down on journalism.
Finish the job, meaning accelerate the war effort so you can then...
No, that's not...
That's not...
When you read the entire paragraph, that wasn't...
But this is what he said over and over again.
It was not until this month...
And he came anywhere close to expressing support for a ceasefire.
He was attacking Kamala Harris for fecklessly supporting a ceasefire during the campaign.
I think there's plenty of public evidence to support your position, and I think to support the contrary position, there's...
A lot of just hope, and the fact that the Biden administration was so bad that almost anything would be better, and the proof will be in the pudding.
We're about to find out.
I went to the State Society of Kentucky ball on Friday night, and I talked to Congressman Jamie Comer, who, by the way, had the pointless Biden impeachment inquiry that he ran.
Everybody forgot about that.
They were like, he was being like grandly touted as the thing that was going to really stick it to Biden and it just fizzled.
But anyway, I asked him about this issue and he said that his interpretation was that Hamas was so scared of Trump that they finally gave in to the demand.
So it's being spun in a way, at least among some Republicans, that this is great for Trump because he finally struck fear into the hearts of Hamas.
And Comer specifically said to me, I should look at the exact quote, but it was something like, Hamas knows that Trump will give Israel whatever it needs to finish the job.
So there's a number of interpretations here.
And I think if you look at the vast majority of the public record, Republicans are not...
I mean, if Trump gets into office...
And withholds arms shipments in a way that Biden never did, then I will freely acknowledge that that contradicts a lot of what thematically I assumed was being built up to just based on his rhetoric and policy.
But until then, I think people should maybe reserve judgment slightly.
I 100% agree.
Because trying to replicate the Reagan coming into office with the Iran hostages, part of that could be PR, obviously.
There is a cessation of hostilities in Gaza right now, as of this morning, so that's significant.
But I'm not willing to declare myself to have entirely love and everything and apologize.
I haven't broken out the champagne yet.
You know, and I could be wrong.
I acknowledge very much that, like, we're at the beginning of this, but all the signs I see are very hopeful, and they were aligned with what I had sort of perceived before, which I guess makes me a little bit more confident about my assessment.
Okay, and one thing I'll say, too, is, you know, I can tell you from firsthand knowledge that there are people around Trump who have actual, who have expressed interest in the contrary point of view.
Would you like to name any names?
No, I can't.
And also I can tell you, I will say, and this is where I totally agree with you, Mike, that you know, if Trump actually withholds weapons, that would be something significant because people like to think that this goal of the Saudi normalization deal, Saudi Arabia and Israel normalizing, that that's like Trump's big card that Saudi Arabia and Israel normalizing, that that's like Trump's big card that he's going That's the peace deal.
Yeah.
But I don't think, honestly, Israel cares that much about normalizing with Saudi Arabia.
I mean, the U.S. wants, you know, people in the Trump camp want that because they want to make even more money with Saudi Arabia.
But Israel itself doesn't, I don't think, care as much about that as other people might think.
Because they already have, they control.
The West Bank and Gaza, with very little resistance.
They've just helped overthrow the government in Syria.
Hezbollah's been weakened.
Iran has been weakened.
And they have all the money in the world coming in from the U.S. And so the one card that really matters is the U.S. military and financial support.
And unless that is threatened.
I think it must have been, though, because, I mean, reports are that...
Weckoff went to Trump and basically told him he'd better take the deal.
What would be the leverage?
To me, the only thing he has is weapons.
Well, to me, my interpretation is that the leverage is that for the first time, the position that Israel ought to accept a ceasefire was finally embraced by both parties, including the incoming administration.
From May of last year until January, that position was at least only publicly and nominally taken By the outgoing Biden administration.
Now that Netanyahu lost the partisan triangulation leverage that he had against the U.S., where he could play politically off the Republicans being opposed to Biden on this issue, then he lost all wiggle room.
I mean, this is obviously speculation, but I can't imagine that that would be enough.
Netanyahu did not want a ceasefire.
He's now, you know, his right-wing coalition is basically disbanding.
A large portion of the Israeli population is mad at him.
I guess not, what is it, like 20 percent?
But I can't imagine that it, I think it had to be something much more specific than just, okay, it looks like both parties are.
I think that's a fair point.
I think that's, yeah.
So here's Mike Waltz on Face the Nation today.
Will the Trump team see this through to completion?
Well, remember the terms of the deal that we finally have come to Was inherited in many ways from the Biden administration.
So it was actually the Biden negotiators that were at the table.
And the other side was dealing with them, but kind of looking to us, particularly Steve Wyckoff, President Trump's Middle East envoy.
And one of the things that we inherited was this framework of women, the elderly and the sick coming out first.
One of the Americans is an Israeli soldier.
That means he'll come out in the second phase, but we will get him out, period.
Adon Alexander.
And I am convinced, Margaret, that this deal would have never happened had President Trump not been elected.
The Trump effect, so to speak.
The families believe that.
They were effusive in their thanks for him and the truth that he put out.
That put Hamas on notice that there will be consequences if they don't let our people go.
There is also, obviously, the party Israel here that feels some pressure to get this done.
One far-right member of the Netanyahu government resigned.
another this morning said he will bring down the Netanyahu government if it does not return to fighting in a way that leads Israel to taking over the entire Gaza Strip.
Does Mr. Trump support annexation of the West Bank in Gaza? - Well, excuse me, very different things.
What we're talking about here is making sure that Hamas is destroyed as a terrorist organization.
Hamas is no different than ISIS or Al-Qaeda or any of the worst of the worst that has so brutalized the Middle East over the years.
And what we have made clear to Bibi Netanyahu, to his government, and I want the Israeli people to hear me loud and clear.
If Hamas reneges on this deal, if Hamas backs out, moves the goalpost, what have you, we will support Israel in doing what it has to do, number one.
And number two, Hamas will never govern Gaza.
That is completely unacceptable because they've made their intention clear.
Which is to destroy Israel and to have future October 7th.
So I understand the concern.
But at the end of the day, Prime Minister Netanyahu supported this deal.
He agreed we needed to get those hostages out.
And within the next 24 hours, we will see three women coming out alive and hugging their families.
And had we not entered this, these people would have died.
Okay, so that's Walt's basically echoing with what Netanyahu said yesterday, right?
Not totally, but he's saying that...
The U.S. under Trump will give Israel full backing to resume fighting in Gaza should Hamas renege on the deal.
And if history is any guide, Israel will find the flimsiest pretext to claim that Hamas has somehow reneged on some aspect of the deal.
That's what Israel has basically done in every comparable scenario in the past.
And Netanyahu apparently has already assured Smotrich...
The hardcore right-wing member of the coalition who hasn't resigned, unlike Ben Gavir, who did, that one of the conditions of the acceptance of this deal was that the war will resume.
And Waltz is saying preemptively that the U.S. under Trump will support that.
Now, I know people want to say, Waltz doesn't speak for Trump.
I don't know.
Waltz goes on television and says, I want to make sure I'm making an announcement clear to Israel on behalf of the incoming president, Donald J. Trump.
What, we think that he's not speaking with authorization there?
That seems implausible to me.
He may very well be speaking on behalf of Trump, but I don't think that necessarily means that Trump is going to okay or return to hostilities.
Netanyahu can say Hamas did X, Y, or Z, tiny thing, and so I should get to renege on this deal, but that doesn't mean Trump's going to accept it, and I think his actions so far have shown that he's not going to.
Again, I could be wrong.
All right, so one final question.
What's the most optimistic scenario for the next Trump administration?
And what's the least optimistic scenario?
So what's the best case scenario and the worst case scenario?
I'll answer first.
I think one thing that I think is probably likely to happen is that there will be a rollback of some of these NGOs and all these kind of scam non-profits.
That somehow finagle themselves to get government subsidy to run outfits that they claim are combating disinformation and misinformation and basically pressure people to restrict speech.
I think Republicans in general are rightly skeptical of that whole enterprise, especially because it's obviously always employed for or tends to be employed for nakedly partisan purposes.
So that's a plausible best.
I don't know if it's the overall best-case scenario, but that's something I'm looking forward to that I would look favorably upon.
In terms of bad stuff, it's in part related to something that I've been having a premonition about, which is that Trump really seems to have a world-historic cult of personality behind him now, or cult devotion.
That's not to say that every Trump supporter is a cultist.
I'm not saying that.
There are plenty of people who are essentially normal, who voted for Trump for essentially normal reasons.
But he does have a fanaticism among a certain segment of his support base that will support anything.
I mean, in part, it relates to the slightly more hierarchical nature of maybe people on the right versus the left, like you did for better.
However much you want to criticize how the left has comported itself, there was a big protest movement against Biden over Gaza policy.
It didn't really amount to much, but it was there.
It's hard to see anything comparable like that happening on the right.
Against Trump, right?
And so I think back to January of 2020 when Trump did the drone strike assassination of Soleimani, and I just remember being inundated with people who were angrily insisting to me that this was part of the America First foreign policy, doing drone strike assassinations of meddlesome Iranian generals when they're on some kind of diplomatic mission to Iraq.
So I could just see that something unexpected or whatever comes up.
And along those lines of the Soleimani assassination, and you see an instant coalescence of the increasingly ascendant, like, alternative media, right-wing adjacent media, and the right-wing officeholders fully in support of it, and they find a way to kind of rationalize it as part of America First.
And I think Biden kind of had less standing to do that among the left, not that it really impeded his ability to do very much, whether it was in Ukraine or Gaza.
But I just kind of – I can't prove it.
It's just a premonition.
I can see something like that happening with Trump that could be somewhat ominous.
So how do you answer both scenario questions, Janine?
Best case and worst case.
What I'm really optimistic about is that he gets us out of these wars and he sort of puts an end to the failed neocon policy that basically every administration for the last couple of decades has held on to.
I think we should be investing our money at home.
I don't have a problem with my tax money going to help Americans who are less fortunate than me.
I do have a problem with it going to Sorry, maybe I should have introduced you.
I'm actually not a foreign policy analyst.
Work for the past couple of years has been suing the government for its involvement in tech censorship.
He's been very good on that.
He's indicated that he's going to roll back a lot of the measures these agencies have taken to work with the tech companies or threaten them and pressure them to censor speech.
He also today said he basically issued an executive order saying he was going to put the TikTok ban on hold, which I'm very pleased about.
But as you've said, he has said things on the other side when it comes to anti-Semitic speech.
That's the big exception on the right for when they laugh about hate speech being censored.
But of course, anti-Semitic speech should be and we should deport students who are non-citizens who say anything anti-Semitic, blah, blah.
He's said he has he's indicated he supports that in some ways.
So that would be a really big problem for me.
I was always worried he might get us into a war with Iran because he's said some hot-headed things about Iran.
I think that much less now.
I'm much less concerned about that.
I think the indications he's made over the past week or so show that he really doesn't want to be embroiled in more Middle East wars.
He could just...
He thinks that Iran tried to assassinate him.
Well, that's...
That seems like a pretty...
I would say that is probably my biggest concern, but I think the Gaza situation or his brokering a ceasefire in Gaza indicates that he doesn't want to be embroiled in a war in that region.
But I have some concerns.
I'm not totally without any concerns.
How about annexing Greenland?
Are you all for that?
I have, like, no opinion on that.
I can only have so many opinions.
Yeah, exactly.
And not everyone needs to have a strong view on...
I mean, you know, one thing that bothers me about him is I don't think he's extremely principled.
He can act a little bit hot-headedly, so as sort of a general matter, I think that opens us up to policies that aren't always the best ones.
So I don't know that I have, like, a lot of specific fears, but I do hope that everything he, you know, that he takes his decision-making processes seriously.
Maybe he learned a little bit from his last administration.
What's up?
How you doing?
Somebody outside the window just...
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Do they know you?
Yeah.
Do you know that guy personally?
That's one of my MAGA fans.
Again, Russiagate.
Yeah, exactly.
I have a lot of MAGA fans, too.
I've had MAGA fans over the years.
I don't know if they like me as much.
I repudiate my fans left and right.
Until I have none left.
My optimistic, somewhat plausible optimistic scenario is, yeah, Trump sees it in his interest to have peace in Gaza and let Gaza rebuild, although, again, I think that's such an impossible dream, but I... That's just my top hope right now.
Shuts down the war in Ukraine, realizes that this is a disaster, negotiates a peace deal with Russia that meets some of its security concerns, no Ukraine and NATO, a rollback of some of the offensive weaponry that's on Russia's borders, and some arrangement for the ethnic Russians in the east of Ukraine along the lines of the Minsk Accords.
And domestically...
That he doesn't rip people off as much as he did the first term passing the tax heist, which is what I regarded, which I thought overwhelmingly favored Trump and his wealthy friends, maybe being a bit more equitable this time.
I'm going to predict right now that the Republicans will in fact pass a renewal of the Trump tax cuts.
But to be fair, I hear this from MAGA people who are not high income, who they feel as if the tax cuts benefited them.
So I want to be fair to them.
I'm not an economist, but my sense was that these tax cuts that Trump passed favored the ultra-wealthy.
So being maybe a bit more equitable this time.
And also, more transparency.
You know, Trump was the target of one of the biggest scams in U.S. history, Russiagate, where he was framed as a Russian agent by his opponents with the help of U.S. intelligence officials.
And we still don't know a lot about it.
So there's still, you know, recently I had a document released by the FBI that goes to the heart of Russiagate that was heavily, heavily redacted.
So I hope that Trump sees it in his own personal interest to have more transparency on intelligence abuses like Russiagate.
And there are plenty of others.
Even if he only focused on Democrat abuses and Democratic...
Projects like the war in Ukraine, which Democrats really helped start with the coup in 2014, and the dirty war in Syria.
He could do a lot of social good by just releasing documents that give the public an idea of what their government was up to, and that was kept from the public.
So, you know, I'm tailoring this optimism to what I think Trump might hopefully see to be in his interest, and one of those could be transparency on these major issues that the public has been kept in the dark about.
All right.
Well, this is our big special inaugural episode.
We are in Washington, D.C. The snow has picked up.
The festivities are accelerating.
So thank you, our guests, for joining us, Aaron and Janine.
And we will sign off for now.
Thank you, Michael.
Thanks for joining us.
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